Hatch: U.N. Disabilities Treaty a Threat to American Sovereignty and Self-Government

Last year, Heritage Action and a host of conservative groups were instrumental in defeating the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which would have failed to help disabled Americans at home or abroad and only served to empower international organizations. Secretary of State John Kerry may cause the treaty to resurface as an issue, though.

In a speech on the Senate Floor, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) today outlined his long support for disability rights throughout his service in the Senate, but said he cannot support the pending U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has indicated it may bring up CRPD, which Hatch opposed when CRPD was voted on by the full Senate last December.

Below are Hatch’s full remarks he made on the floor today in opposition to the treaty:

Mr. President, 23 years ago I stood here on the Senate floor as we voted 91-6 for the conference report on the Americans with Disabilities Act. I predicted that this landmark piece of legislation would literally unlock the resources of individuals with disabilities that had previously been wasted. I worked long and hard to get it enacted into law.

And in 2008, I again stood here on the Senate floor as we passed the ADA Amendments Act by unanimous consent. I said that it was part of our ongoing effort to expand opportunities for individuals with disabilities and to help them participate in the American dream. I remain committed to that effort.

Both of these legislative achievements were the result of negotiation and compromise and they directly addressed and provided concrete solutions for problems faced by American citizens. We should address such public policy issues through the legislative process so that elected representatives make the decisions that affect Americans and are accountable to them.

Mr. President, there is underway an effort to promote the rights and opportunities of persons with disabilities through a treaty rather than through legislation. Advocates of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, or CRPD, appear to believe that statutes and treaties are simply alternative means to accomplish the same end. Though I have labored with these advocates on disability legislation, I must respectfully but firmly disagree.

My record on disability legislation speaks for itself, but I cannot support the CRPD because the cost to American sovereignty and self-government clearly outweighs any concrete benefit to Americans.

When Alexander Hamilton explained the American system of representative self-government, he famously said that in America “the people govern; here, they act by their immediate representatives.” Those words today are inscribed above an entrance to the House of Representatives in the Capitol, a building that Thomas Jefferson described as “dedicated to the sovereignty of the people.”

That sovereignty certainly includes the authority to elect representatives and the authority of those representatives to enact laws. But it is much more than that. The American people also have authority to define our culture, express our values, set our priorities, and balance the many competing interests that exist in a free society. To put it simply, the American people must have the last word.

The CRPD would undermine that sovereignty, compromise self-government, and give the last word to the United Nations. Let me explain how.

The CRPD is not a treaty with other nations, but a treaty with the United Nations itself. Ratifying it would create a wide range of obligations for the United States and authorize the United Nations to determine whether we are meeting those obligations.

The U.N. website says that the CRPD legally binds any nation ratifying it to adhere to its principles. The treaty applies those principles in more than two dozen areas of national life including education, health, employment, accessibility, and independent living as well as participation in political, public, and cultural life. Article 8 even requires ratifying nations to “raise awareness throughout society, including at the family level, regarding persons with disabilities.”

The treaty also spells out what adherence to its principles in these many areas will require. Ratifying nations must enact, modify, or abolish not only laws and regulations at all levels of government – federal, state, and local – but also social customs and cultural practices. Ratifying nations must refrain from engaging in any acts or practices that are inconsistent with the treaty as well as ensure that all public authorities and institutions act in conformity with it.

The heart of the CRPD is a committee of 18 experts elected by the nations ratifying the treaty that has authority to determine if those nations are in compliance. Each nation must submit to this committee periodic comprehensive reports on measures taken to meet the obligations imposed by the treaty. The U.N. committee dictates the content of these reports, evaluates whether a nation is in compliance, and makes whatever recommendations it chooses.

I commend to Senators an article co-authored by our former colleague from Arizona, Jon Kyl, and published in the current issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. He explains well how international law can undermine democratic sovereignty. Of this particular treaty, the CRPD, he writes: “If the treaty has a practical effect, it will be due in large part to interpretations made by foreign government officials and judges and by nongovernmental organizations, none answerable to American voters.”

Under the U.S. Constitution, ratified treaties are the supreme law of the land. Since the United States has long had the most progressive disability laws and policies in the world, we likely are already doing much that the CRPD requires. But that is not the point, and instead highlights the real problem. Ratifying the CRPD would endorse an official ongoing role for the United Nations in evaluating virtually every aspect of American life. Ratifying the CRPD would say that the United Nations, not the American people, has the final say about whether the United States is meeting its obligations in these many areas. And it would impose this cost to American sovereignty and self-government with no concrete benefit to Americans.

Ratifying the CRPD will not establish a single right for a single American, it will not provide for Americans with disabilities anything that American law has not or could not provide. It would not even help Americans with disabilities who travel overseas because their treatment depends on the laws and policies of other countries, not ours.

The CRPD’s combination of obligations and U.N. oversight can help move nations that have not done so on their own toward protecting the rights and promoting the opportunities of persons with disabilities. That, I take it, is the strategic purpose of the treaty. But the United States is not only far down that road, we literally blazed the trail.

Treaty advocates argue that the CRPD’s impact on American sovereignty and self-government can be minimized by the many caveats that would accompany ratification. These are commonly referred to as reservations, understandings, and declarations. The legal status of these caveats, however, is unclear. The CRPD itself states that “[r]eservations incompatible with the object and purpose of the [CRPD] shall not be permitted,” a judgment reserved to the U.N. committee. No less an authority than Harold Koh, former State Department Legal Adviser and now Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale, has questioned whether such declarations have “either domestic or international legal effect.”

Treaty advocates also emphasize that the U.N. committee will have no formal authority to interfere domestically in the United States. But as I explained, American sovereignty and self-government are not so narrow that they can be undermined only if we literally let the United Nations run our country. The U.N. and its components hardly need a treaty to opine on aspects of American life or public policy; they already do so. It is, however, something else entirely for the United States formally to endorse the U.N.’s right to do so and subject ourselves to their evaluation.

Treaty advocates say that ratifying the CRPD would give the United States a “seat at the table” to promote the rights and opportunities of persons with disabilities around the world. Ratifying the CRPD will neither create, nor is necessary to maintain, America’s global leadership on behalf of persons with disabilities. We had the most progressive laws in the world decades before the CRPD existed. Individual nations, as well as the European Union, are today modeling their laws after ours even without our ratifying the treaty.

The only table in this arena at which the United States doesn’t already have a seat is the U.N. disability committee. But do the math. The committee has 18 members who are elected by the CRPD’s state parties, currently 132 nations. The chances of the United States having a seat at that table at any particular time is remote, and will get even smaller as even more nations ratify the treaty. And besides, as I just noted, advocates acknowledge that the U.N. committee has no formal authority anyway.

Finally, treaty advocates say that United States ratification will encourage other nations to do so. But at least 19 nations on four continents – from Norway and the Russian Federation to Barbados, Israel, and Liberia – have ratified the CRPD just since it was received here in the Senate a little more than a year ago.

I have not addressed substantive issues with the CRPD as currently drafted but I will mention just one. For more than four decades, American disability law and policy have used an objective, functional definition of disability. A disability is an impairment that substantially limits a major life activity. The CRPD, however, states that “disability is an evolving concept” involving barriers that hinder “full and effective participation on an equal basis with others.” The threat to American sovereignty and self-government I have described would exist even if the CRPD utilized a similar concept of disability. But, at least by the CRPD’s terms, it appears that the U.N. committee will use an evolving concept of disability to evaluate how the United States has implemented its objective concept of disability.

There exists virtually nothing that the United States could do after ratification that it could not, or does not already, do today. The truth is that every argument for ratifying the CRPD applies properly to other countries, not to the United States. The only real benefit of ratification that I can see would be to endorse the principles and policy statements in the treaty. The United States, however, either already do so by law or can do so in ways that do not undermine our sovereignty and self-government.

In the end, the most potent kind of leadership is the kind that America has exercised for decades already – taking real action to protect the rights and promote the opportunities of persons with disabilities. I remain as committed as ever to that ongoing responsibility.

Archives

Archives

Categories

Categories

ABOUT US

Right Side News is your online newspaper, publishing accurate information about threats against Western civilization. Right Side News stands out among news sites, offering the right news from sources you can trust. Find out what the real news is while there is still time to make a difference in your home, your community and your nation.